Elizabeth Siddal: The Pre-Raphaelite Supermodel

A R T L▼R K

On the 11th of February 1862, Elizabeth Siddal, an English artists’ model, died in London of a self-administered overdose of laudanum. In the early 1850s, as a young woman, Siddal was painted extensively by the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. She sat for Walter Deverell’s Viola in Twelfth Night (1850), for William Holman Hunt’s British Girl inA Converted British Family Rescuing a Christian Priest from Persecution by the Druids (1851), for John Everett Millais’sOphelia(1852) – for whi...